Welly boots and trainers don't mix well with ice and snow so Dave Hewitt urges all of us to think about sensible shoes this winter.
Occasionally a day on the hill can leave you puzzled and troubled, and the Saturday before last was one such day. Tessa and I were in the Lakes for a long weekend - she is, as I've mentioned here before, a Coniston girl, so we're often down seeing her parents. It's always a double treat - good company in good surroundings.
On the Friday, the car was off the road (it gets MOTed in Coniston rather than in Stirling where we live - a long, domestic story with which I won't bore you), so I headed off alone on foot into the southern fells. This year's resolution, as outlined last time, is to spread my wings a bit in terms of choice of hills - which means fewer Ben Cleuchs when at home and fewer Old Men of Coniston when we're in the Lakes. I was up Coniston Old Man five times in 2002 - hardly a huge number compared with Jeff Wilkinson who tells me, of his ascents over the past decade, that "on average it must be 60 to 70 times a year". But he's a Conistonian, based at the foot of the hill, whereas I'm 170 miles away - so it's like comparing oranges and giraffes.
Anyway, I'll doubtless climb the Old Man a few times in 2003 - if nothing else it's an ideal blood-pumping start to Scafellean treks. This recent time, though, I dragged myself away from COM comforts and, after walking the length of the Walna Scar track to the pass at just over 600m, turned left, away from the famous fells on my right. What followed - Walna Scar itself, White Maiden, White Pike (much more rocky and impressive on its southern side than the map suggests) and Caw - were excellent, and involved meeting a sum total of no other people, this being off the Wainwright map. I did however see a sizeable chunk of Wales from Walna Scar, something I haven't had the pleasure of from COM itself - where squinting for Blackpool Tower through horizon haze has been my limit thus far.
The Friday outing isn't the one I want to focus on here but a clue to Saturday's incident came in the amount of ice. The tops gave easy walking - thin, almost fluffy snow - but the slopes leading to them were ribbons and rivers of ice, especially on any path or track. The first half of the Walna Scar route was OK (it's akin to the Corrieyairack if you don't know it - an old, rough right of way occasionally used by bikers and 4x4 fiends as well as walkers), but once beyond the bridge over Goat's Water, where it starts to steepen and zigzag, it was literally impossible to stay on track. Mostly this wasn't a problem but at one point I half-wished I hadn't left the axe in the house. There was no danger of falling and dying but there was a danger of losing height in an involuntary toboggan. Geology solved the problem - the whole area is strewn with slate screes, so I switched to stone-age mode and used a thin piece of slate to hack a couple of footholds in a particularly slithery section.
Next morning there was no question of leaving axe and crampons behind. The hill Tessa and I drove to in the newly returned, smooth-running, turbo-tuned car (OK, OK, it's an F-reg Fiesta) was Seat Sandal - not that much higher than the Coniston outliers but much more in the centre of things and accessed by an eroded path and so likely to be heavily iced in places. We met Portinscale megabaggers Ann and Rowland Bowker at the top of Dunmail Raise, with the idea of tackling this predominantly pudding-shaped hill by the easiest of all routes - up from the west beside Raise Beck, then on to open slopes leading to the 736m summit.
There was a reason for the choice of hill - Tessa had never worn crampons and the plan was to let her get the feel of the things on relatively easy ground. The crampon equivalent of bedding in a new pair of shoes. She has owned crampons for over a year but last year's mild mess that passed for winter didn't allow much scope for icy escapades. As things turned out, she now had to wear them in a substantially more serious situation than the intended easy pottering - but genuine practice is almost always a better way to learn a new skill than is pretence.
The path was busy as we set off and became busier as the mid-morning walkers' rush hour gathered pace. The ground was bone-hard but initially with deep-set frost (it had been cold and clear for well over a week) rather than any actual ice. Before long the path started to consist of three types of micro-terrain: hard water ice, dry clean boulders, and thin soft snow. There was next to no overlap between these, even when all three were side by side within a few metres, so for a while it was easy - walk on the rocks or the snow and dodge the ice. A little higher up however and the whole path became heavily iced, with beautiful thick bulges on the rocky sections beside the stepped waterfall. Things were becoming serious - this was no longer a stroll.
Around this time Rowland decided to turn back. He was carrying crampons and an axe but has been struggling with ankle and knee problems such that hard ground is a real pain. (This didn't stop him climbing the rocky and icy Stone Arthur above Grasmere after his retreat, mind you.) Tessa, Ann and I carried on but within a few minutes it was evident that crampons were needed, so we stopped among some relatively unskiddy boulders to perform the time-honoured ungainly ritual that is applying spikes to boots. Progress speeded up the instant we had them on and the risk factor diminished substantially.
The place I normally suggest for a first-ever crampon outing is the north ridge of Beinn Ime - steep but not too steep and tending to provide reliable ice as soon as any real winter arrives. Whether Raise Beck on 11 January 2003 was more serious than Beinn Ime is hard to assess (oranges and giraffes again) but on the whole I'd say it was at least its equal. Certainly there was much more need for precise foot placement beside the beck as compared with the open slopes of a hillside. It was more akin to walking along a narrow ridge and a stumble would have had serious consequences.
The girl done well, picking her way up some mad-looking icefall-type terrain with considerable neatness and quickly twigging to the trick of walking in precisely the places she would normally avoid. (See Ann Bowker's pictures here to get some idea of the amount of ice in the trench of the valley.) It was the other people on the hill who made me worried.
The valley had become steadily busier as we picked our way up the beckside path and as we were becramponing ourselves a couple of family parties squeezed past, soon followed by a third. And what was startling was this - the children not only lacked any kind of ironmongery but they were shod in either trainers or wellies and were clutching plastic sledges. The parents looked at us, presumably thinking we were massively overcooking things with this crampon malarkey. We in turn looked at them, thinking the parents were reckless beyond reason. Nothing, of course, was said.
One of these parties turned back at the serious-ice bit but the rest carried on - we later heard them yelling as they sledged on the side of Dollywaggon up near Grisedale Tarn. Now I wouldn't in any way want to deny them the pleasure of their day and who am (childless) I to pontificate on the way that parents should act in respect of their children? I also tend towards what could be called the Hamish Brown stance on young people and hills - that the 1971 Cairngorms tragedy notwithstanding, it's a great shame that it's now nigh on impossible to take teenagers on to even the most mundane of uplands without the leaders having to jump through any number of bureaucratic-qualification hoops.
These weren't teenagers, though. Unless I'm much mistaken, none of the children being led up the Raise Beck icefall were much more than ten, if that. It looked to me as though that old peril, peer pressure, had seen a pre-arranged, mutually agreed sledging trip grow from a well-intentioned idea into a potentially lethal episode.
My feelings about the state of the hillside were basically this - even had I been there alone, I would definitely have wanted crampons. In fact I'd go further - had I been there without crampons I would either have turned back or pressed on entirely against my better judgement. In plain vibrams - never mind trainers, wellies, sandals or stilettos - there was considerable potential, over almost a kilometre, for a single poor foot-placement to lead to a fall into the rocky beck, where a head injury or worse would have been the likely consequence.
As far as I'm aware, all the parents and their children made it back down safely later in the day. Presumably they returned by pretty much the same route (whereas after reaching the summit we dropped down the easy southern ridge to the Rothay, where Rowland met us); but all the western ways off are steep, such that where there wasn't ice there would have been skiddy snow of the kind never fun to descend.
So maybe it was all OK, maybe the parents knew what they were doing and our unvoiced concerns were misplaced. I'm not so sure, though. A little further up Raise Beck, after the family groups had negotiated the tricky section and reached the easier slopes beyond, we met two climbers coming down after having roped their way up some gully. "Good to see at least some people are being sensible," they said.
Dave Hewitt
23/1/03
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
